eBay bargains - what's your latest conquest?

[timidpimpin]

I just remembered a B&W G3 350MHz rev 2 I bought on ebay around 2005 for only $20. It actually ended up being quite mint also. From memory I ended up installing a G4 upgrade and using it as an 8.6 machine. Ended up donating it to a local school's computer lab a few years later.

 

[Project Alice]

I almost bought a Beige G3 with a 1Ghz G4 ealier. It had one bid and was for $175 + $30 shipping.

I decided against it due to it being a bad financial choice at the moment. Hopefully that single bid was someone on here!

 

[retta283]

Got an early 2005 17" PB with maxed out specs, $75. Think this was a pretty good score. Currently anxiously awaiting it, it is working and looks pretty good overall but I've been burned before...

 

[Abbbby333]

I took a gamble on a 17" powerbook that didn't list the model, hoping that it would be the A1139. I paid about $100, $135 including tax and shipping. Turns out my gamble paid off! It was indeed the A1139 and it came with 2 GB of Ram, and a battery that holds charge and has only 140 cycles on it (I think that's good for a 15 year old machine, but I'm new.) I'm planning on upgrading the HD to a SSD and changing out the thermal paste. Then I'll be setting it up with tiger so that I can play games! I set up tiger last night a test and it is working beautifully so far! The condition is also really great! There a couple of scuffs on the corners and that's about it. I'm very excited as this is my first vintage mac and I'm really looking forward to playing games that I used to love as a child. The nostalgia is real!

 

[repairedCheese]

Just bit the bullet on a 1.25 ghz 1.75 gb ram G4 MDD said to be working, currently set up to dual boot 10.4 and 9. Yeah, it was a little rich for my blood, but the way I see it, it will basically be the last ppc Mac I'll ever really need.

 

[MacFoxG4]

Taking a chance on an 800mhz 14'' iBook G3 from 2002. I missed having a Dual USB iBook, so I've been looking around eBay and came across this 800mhz model for a good price. I like that this iBook has a DVD/CD writer combo drive. There's no OS or HDD, so I will have to use my external SSD. I plan on using this iBook mainly for OS 9, though I'll run Jaguar on here too until I can get a G4 PB to run Jaguar on.

 

[Amethyst1]

There's no OS or HDD, so I will have to use my external SSD.

I hope your SSD has Firewire 'cause using USB 1.1 for the boot drive is bloody murder. Good luck with the Radeon 7500. 👍

 

[MacFoxG4]

I hope your SSD has Firewire 'cause using USB 1.1 for the boot drive is bloody murder. Good luck with the Radeon 7500. 👍

My SSD is an FW/USB enclosure, so I'm good on that. Using PPC Macs has given me an appreciation for FireWire. Yeah, the Radeon 7500 is a gamble. I read that there's a good chance that if an 800mhz iBook G3 is working today than it probably had the GPU replaced under Apple's replacement program. The seller says that the iBook works, so I'm hoping that the GPU is one of the fixed ones.

 

[Amethyst1]

Using PPC Macs has given me an appreciation for FireWire.

Yeah, TDM over Firewire is so handy, I wouldn't survive a day without it.

 

[z970]

@repairedCheese If it happens to be in sub-par condition, you may find the thread I made about restoring my own MDD useful.

Power Mac G4 MDD Restoration

Continuing from my initial post... I've had my eye on the MDD ever since around 2016, when I saw one in person while visiting the local Mac fixit shop (had I known they were going to recycle everything "obsolete", I would have asked if they needed it). At the time, I instead opted for a G5 as I...

forums.macrumors.com

It's still sparkling to this day. 🙂

...And I can sympathize with you; mine was also overpriced for the state it was in.

 

[repairedCheese]

@repairedCheese If it happens to be in sub-par condition, you may find the thread I made about restoring my own MDD useful.

Power Mac G4 MDD Restoration

Continuing from my initial post... I've had my eye on the MDD ever since around 2016, when I saw one in person while visiting the local Mac fixit shop (had I known they were going to recycle everything "obsolete", I would have asked if they needed it). At the time, I instead opted for a G5 as I...

forums.macrumors.com

It's still sparkling to this day. 🙂

...And I can sympathize with you; mine was also overpriced for the state it was in.

I'll certainly keep that in mind. Fortunately the seller put a lot of pictures up, even if all of them are maybe not the absolute most useful. But the old machine looks to be in quite good shape, considering. Of course, I won't know until I get it in my hands, but UPS is saying Thursday, and I really do not want anything to get damaged in shipping. Even if I can get my money back, that's not the point.

It's really the Mac I've always wanted, the last and best ppc Mac that ran OS 9 fully.

Is it nuts that I'm already thinking about how I can upgrade it?

 

[z970]

@repairedCheese Not at all. It's good to be prepared. 😎

 

[repairedCheese]

@z970mp Well, if I'm going to do anything to it, it's add a sata card, as I don't trust IDE hard drives in the slightest these days. It may end up with a usb card at some point, but I don't need that quite as much.

And it's not like I haven't been looking at the alternatives. Slower, lower end G4 systems have popped up plenty of times, usually around 400mhz. And if I only wanted to run 9.2, that would be fine. But I do want the system to be able to run TenFourFox, and run it fairly well. I can't really say my 700mhz eMac does that. Shame there's not much in the way of of cpu upgrades for it, but I feel like I would have spent more getting one of those 400mhz systems somewhere in the ballpark on this MDD anyway.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Yeah, TDM over Firewire is so handy, I wouldn't survive a day without it.

Same here and Apple's abandonment of the standard on newer Macs has been a great disappointment. They should have continued to advance its transfer rates alongside that of USB because it underpinned what had distinguished the Mac platform from its rivals. To me, that was another sign of the company losing direction.

 

[Amethyst1]

Same here and Apple's abandonment of the standard on newer Macs has been a great disappointment.

Thunderbolt is the new FW, and it can do TDM. It's a shame it's so expensive though.

 

[weckart]

Same here and Apple's abandonment of the standard on newer Macs has been a great disappointment. They should have continued to advance its transfer rates alongside that of USB because it underpinned what had distinguished the Mac platform from its rivals. To me, that was another sign of the company losing direction.

I think it was less a sign of Apple's getting bored rather than its realisation that FW was a dead end with too little traction among the general public. Unlike USB, it required licence fees, which meant hardware uptake was slower and less popular. As far as I can remember, there was a grand total of one very expensive FW pen drive ever released even though booting on USB was hit and miss on PPC Macs. Apart from its fans in the DAW peripheral market and some adoption in video cameras, too few bothered with it and even Sony couldn't make its iLink rebranding take off. See also TB. The advances in USB are making TB less of a compelling buy outside of the pro market.

 

[repairedCheese]

Yeah, TDM over Firewire is so handy, I wouldn't survive a day without it.

Honestly, the coming PMG4 MDD would be so much harder to set up if I couldn't just throw my eMac into target disk mode. If it was easy to pull hard drives out of those systems, I'd just do that, but I'm not in the mood to have to dealing with discharging a crt, especially when the crt on it doesn't work. Apple gave me an easy option to migrate everything.

I honestly can't imagine doing the same in 2002 with x86 hardware. Windows would have hated just copying over system partitions. And at the time, I was using Windows 98, an os that would break if you breathed on it wrong, so there's a robustness I really like about the old Mac OS.

 

[JMacHack]

Same here and Apple's abandonment of the standard on newer Macs has been a great disappointment. They should have continued to advance its transfer rates alongside that of USB because it underpinned what had distinguished the Mac platform from its rivals. To me, that was another sign of the company losing direction.

Call me crazy, but I think the writing was on the wall for Firewire when iPods started shipping with USB chargers. As cool and advanced as I think Firewire was, USB just caught up and then overtook it. Then Thunderbolt was developed and that was it for Firewire.

And really, everyone won from USB winning out. Anyone that wasn't Apple or Sony iirc had to pay them $1 per port, per device to use Firewire (post Jobs' comeback). USB requires no royalties and is supported by a wider consortium. Eventually the drawbacks were mitigated and Firewire just couldn't keep up. I wouldn't say Apple lost its direction so much as it just didn't make sense to support a standard that had very, very little support outside of its own ecosystem and didn't offer any significant advantages even then.

The advances in USB are making TB less of a compelling buy outside of the pro market.

Which makes me wonder if we'll see TB stop increasing transfer rates eventually and go the way of the dodo too.

 

[1042686]

Picked up a 1.33ghz ibookg4 w/ charger for $20. I saw that it has protools & some other DAW software which was cool. Haven’t played with it yet but will post some pics eventually. I know I sold my old ibook & tried really hard to stay away but I just couldn’t pass it up for a $20.

 

[repairedCheese]

Had a bit of a scare trying to turn the system on for the first time, but one pram reset later and it's everything it said it would be, one working 1.25ghz G4 with 1.75 gb of ram.

And if i thought seeing my 700mhz eMac run 9.2 with 1gb of ram was nuts, this thing is in a whole different level. The best part is seeing 1250mhz in the system profiler, even though they clearly imagined a world with gigabytes of ram in OS 9, they couldn't imagine gigahertz. I love it.

I have so much I can do with this, and the only shame is that i can't play with ppc64 Linux. I guess you really do need more than one old Mac!

 

[z970]

the only shame is that i can't play with ppc64 Linux

You aren't missing much.

Congratulations on your acquisition of one of the best Macs they ever made. 😉

 

[Amethyst1]

The best part is seeing 1250mhz in the system profiler, even though they clearly imagined a world with gigabytes of ram in OS 9, they couldn't imagine gigahertz. I love it.

Congrats on your acquisition - I hope you received some earplugs along with it. 😀

On a similar note, people living on the dark side of the moog moon couldn't imagine gigabytes of RAM in 1999 either:

 

[repairedCheese]

You aren't missing much.

Congratulations on your acquisition of one of the best Macs they ever made. 😉

If I ever want to mess with ppc64 Linux, that's what my PMG5 is for!

And honestly? I can already feel it. Like, for example, I set my desk up so I could use a kvm switch to allow me to just use one keyboard and mouse between my regular computer and my eMac. But, when i switched in OS 9, the eMac would just either lock up, or lose the keyboard and mouse, I could never actually tell which.

The MDD doesn't have this problem.

Congrats on your acquisition - I hope you received some earplugs along with it. 😀

On a similar note, people living on the dark side of the moog moon couldn't imagine gigabytes of RAM in 1999 either:

View attachment 939028

And you know what? I thought this thing was going to be loud, but it simply isn't.

Of course, I did grow up with one of these. You don't know loud until you have to live with a refrigerator bolted to the bottom of your computer.

 

[Amethyst1]

And you know what? I thought this thing was going to be loud, but it simply isn't. [...] Of course, I did grow up with one of these. You don't know loud until you have to live with a refrigerator bolted to the bottom of your computer.

Fair point. 🙂 Ah, the awesome days of overclocking a 700-something MHz AMD Athlon to reach the mythical 1 GHz.

 

[repairedCheese]

Fair point. 🙂 Ah, the awesome days of overclocking a 700-something MHz AMD Athlon to reach the mythical 1 GHz.

Come on, Mac OS 9.2 knows what's up, ghz isn't a real unit of measure and no computer could ever reach it!

Not that I knew any better, I was on a AMD K-6 II 550mhz for way, way too long back then, and hopped to a low end Core 2 Quad late, too. I still have the parts for that Super Socket 7 build, and the Voodoo 5 5500 I replaced my Voodoo 3 2000 with. Can you tell I made some choices growing up?